Ranked at the top of AFI’s list of the greatest films of all time, Orson Welles’ portrait of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane (a thinly veiled stand-in for William Randolph Hearst) is brilliant, blistering and beautiful. The story moves through the tragedies and triumphs of Kane’s life, from a happy childhood in snowy Colorado cut short; to a towering ascendance in the newspaper industry; a dysfunctional marriage with a tone-deaf wife he tries desperately to mold into a great opera singer; and a cloistered existence in his palatial home Xanadu. Welles’ superb cast, many from his own Mercury Theatre, is…

Three quarters of a century after its release in 1941, Orson Welles’ towering achievement CITIZEN KANE is still a triumph of style, an endlessly fascinating mystery, a masterpiece to be marveled at for all time. It continually places atop lists of the greatest films of all time, including AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movies lists, both in 1998 and in 2007. Welles said, in an undated statement now included in the AFI Catalog entry on CITIZEN KANE, “I wished to make a motion picture which was not a narrative of action so much as an examination of character…There have been many motion pictures and novels rigorously…